Re-Entry

You have to ease back in after a trip like that. It was intense. We spent more time together than we had in many years. Homeschooling felt rough at times, but the kids actually managed to work through 2-3 chapters of math while we were gone. I thought we would do a lot of corresponding with people back home but we hardly wrote any letters or post cards. I thought they would have these beautiful journals full of thoughtful reflections, but they did a lot of random sketching in their notebooks. Looks like corn, is what they wrote on a lot of pages. I cannot disagree, there was a lot of corn. We drove about 7,000 miles, if you count all the driving around the East Bay we did. They did read a lot and we listened to a lot of interesting podcasts and books. One was called "To the Best of Our Knowledge" and the episode about the caves had us all breathlessly captivated. With all the distractions of home gone, we learned a lot about ourselves and each other. We learned to tell each other exactly what we needed. Not that we could always get it right then, but we learned to ask anyway. The decisions to travel and to homeschool were on rather different threads, although they do go together well. But what that hints at is that there were growing pains, along with the wanderlust.  Now that we're all back home again there's a temptation to settle back into the roles and spaces that were not serving us well.

Anyway, there was not a lot to come back to, schedule-wise. The calendar was blissfully clear. I did laundry and had my neighbor over for tea and we celebrated Laurel's birthday by eating breakfast at our usual breakfast spot down the street. I took the kids for a hike at a park near my brother's house and the hillsides were almost glowing, from the last of the fall leaves. When we went down into the trailhead, two hunters were dragging a buck out of the woods, much to my surprise. The trail smelled of blood and wet leaves. The most Pennsylvanian thing ever. Our feet were soaking wet because everyone outgrew their rain boots on our trip. I had sort of forgotten about rain boots, actually, until that moment I felt my feet sink into the water-logged soil under the grass. The next day we planned to go on another hike to look for the fox we had seen over the summer, but it rained and rained, hovering near 32 all day. We didn't actually leave the house the entire day. It was all dance parties and Nintendo. Today we we visited our librarian and got new books to read. It was sunny, but very cold.

I ordered rain boots.